20 October 2008

Paper Towns -- John Green

When Quentin Jacobsen was nine years old, he and his next door neighbor, Margo Roth Speigelman, found a dead man in the park.

Now seniors with only a few weeks until graduation, Q and Margo Roth Speigelman* are friendly, but aren't friends. Q has been in love with her forever, and really, how could he not be?:

Margo Roth Speigelman, whose stories of epic adventures would blow through school like a summer storm: an old guy living in a broken-down house in Hot Coffee, Mississippi, taught Margo how to play the guitar. Margo Roth Speigelman, who spent three days traveling with the circus—they thought she had potential on the trapeze. Margo Roth Speigelman, who drank a cup of herbal tea with the Mallionaires backstage after a concert while they drank whiskey. Margo Roth Speigelman, who got into that concert by telling the bouncer she was the bassist's girlfriend, and didn't they recognize her, and come on guys seriously, my name is Margo Roth Speigelman and if you go back there and ask the bassist to take one look at me, he will tell you that I either am his girlfriend or he wishes I was, and then the bouncer did so, and then the bassist said "yeah that's my girlfriend let her in the show," and then later the bassist wanted to hook up with her and she rejected the bassist from The Mallionaires. The stories, when they were shared, inevitably ended with, I mean, can you believe it? We often could not, but they always proved true."

So, yes—Q is very surprised when Margo Roth Speigelman shows up at his bedroom window one night and invites him out for a night of epic adventure and revenge. That she, Margo Roth Speigelman, chooses him, Q. And of course he goes. And he wonders, that night, if everything will be different the next day at school.

And it is. Because Margo Roth Speigelman has disappeared. But she's left clues behind...

Okay, first of all, thumbs up. No reservations at all. I loved Q, I loved Radar and Ben. Well, Ben drove me crazy but I felt like he was a real person driving me crazy. I loved Lacey. Margo Roth Speigelman was a bit more slippery. I had mixed-at-best feelings about her, but because Q cared, I cared. And I cared a lot. The entire second half of the book had me biting my nails and worried. Paper Towns is melancholy, laugh-out-loud-funny, downright sad, often hopeful and always thoughtful.

I did had a hard time separating Paper Towns from Looking for Alaska in my mind. Q, himself, has quite a bit in common with Looking for Alaska'sPudge (and actually, to a lesser extent, to An Abundance of Katherines'Colin): he's extremely bright, a bit neurotic, somewhat geeky but still cool, he has excellent friends, and he loves a semi-mysterious, possibly unattainable** girl. As I love heroes like that, I have no issue with that***. I loved Pudge and Colin, and now I love Q as well. But the similarities between Pudge and Q combined with a missing girl who may-or-may-not be alive, for me, created even more tension and made me even more concerned than I think I would have been if I'd never read LfA. Make sense?

Paper Towns has more depth, I think, than John Green's first two books. (Which were strong books anyway—so that's kind of saying a lot.) The themes that have been revisited are worth revisiting. Identity vs. image, the real, actual person vs. the idea of the person—I kept thinking back to that professor of mine in college who told me that sometimes she'd look around the classroom and wonder what was going on behind all those faces. I think that sometimes people need to be reminded to do that.

On one hand, noticing those things was really cool. It made me feel like I'm (however peripherally) part of... something. On the other, whenever I noticed one of those things, it pulled me out of the story a bit. It made me feel sort of like I was on John Green's journey with Q instead of my own journey with Q, if that makes any sense. (Possibly it doesn't.) But the awesomeness of the Nerdfighter community far outweighs any piddling reading issues I had, so I'm not complaining.

____________________________________________________

*She just has one of those names. You have to use the whole thing every time.

**This last bit doesn't quite jive with An Abundance of Katherines, because in that one Katherine isn't all that mysterious and also Katherine wasn't unattainable because they haddated, but I still felt similarities, so... yeah.

***I've see certain themes and character types show up again and again in Chris Crutcher's novels, and it's never bothered me.

Comments

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I really wanted to buy that book, but living in Brazil sucks really hard. First of all, it would cost me all of my savings, because in this shit of a country books are about as expensive as jewels - though they do not look so great in a woman's neck.

Oh, I think there's only a first of all, at last. But, well, it is a good reason, isn't it?

I'm also waiting for his other two novels to come by mail, for I've ordered them on a local library, but it also takes forever to bring ANYTHING to Brazil - so they told me it's only coming in two more days, five weeks later.

I keep wanting to pick it up, but I was afraid it would remind me too much of As Simple as Snow, which kind of annoyed and intrigued me at the same time. Now that I've read your review, I'm still worried.

I'm only halfway through, but does Margo seem to be the exact same person as Alaska to anyone else? They've both got that bubbly, ultra-confident, and yet somehow cryptic personality. I'm reading the name Margo, but thinking Alaska.

It doesn't matter, really. I'm loving the book to death anyway. But (and this might be because I haven't finished it yet) it doesn't seem that Q needs her, or reaaallly wants her. I feel I don't know him yet because I don't know what he wants, he's just going along for the ride. So far the Q/Margo relationship is running parallel to the Pudge/Alaska circumstances: he didn't have or reach a goal, per se, just experienced this fabulous, difficult girl.

Maybe I'll just shut up and read the rest. The writing, as usual, is nothing but stellar. So kudos for that.

Thanks for the review - I had SO many similar thoughts after finishing it this weekend. John's definitely gotten a hold of a formula for his main characters. I was comparing it to LFA the entire time as well, which did heighten my nervous feeling about MRS (HA! Margo Roth Speigelman is initialed MRS) until they **SPOILZ** found her. I may be alone, but I found the "Looking for Clues" part a little tedious. Once they hit the road, it was - literally - off to the races and the pages turned themselves. I am an absolute fan of John Green and this is spectacular - I guess I was expecting P Towns to achieve beyond what was already a very high bar. In my mind, this is great, but no greater than LFA.

My first thought when reading your review was, "Huh, that sounds like As Simple As Snow." And then I saw Diana's comment above. Have you read ASAS? Because I really enjoyed it, and this DOES sound awfully similar...

I found myself not wanting Margo to be dead, but worried that the other alternatives could be just as bad. Not finding would just be ridiculous because 3/4 of the book is spent looking for her and finding her could just be anticlimactic, unless it was done in a spectacular way. I was silly to worry, though, because Green worked it out really well. I really need to post about this one, I read it over a month ago. I'm glad someone is on top of things in the old blogiverse.

To anyone worried about the similarites to As Simple As Snow: I've read that one, too. And I see your concern -- but Paper Towns has a very different tone and I, personally, liked it much more. So you may still want to give it a try!

Matt: Yes! The roadtrip section was a real page-turner -- I need to read it again soon because I zoomed so quickly through that bit (the countdown stressed me out!) that I'm sure I missed stuff.

Did anyone else also notice other little Brotherhood 2-isms, such as the "Best Wishes" that Q tacked onto the end of his email to Margo's ex? There was one more in the very first chapter but I can't reference my book as I've loaned it to a friend.

i read Looking For Alaska very recently (for whatever reason, despite loving An Abundance of Katherines, I kept putting off LFA). I do see the similarities between Alaska and Margo, but I think Margo is more complicated -- there's no Tragic Secret driving her, for one, and her relationships with her classmates were fairly ordinary, whereas Alaska reminded me more of Stargirl in a Very Special Unique Snowflake kind of way. In general, Paper Towns just felt like it could happen in the world I grew up in, which made me feel much more connected to its characters and what happened to them than I did with LFA (which I still loved).